When Things Get Back to Normal (3 page)

I found no such evidence, though, and, as a matter of fact, the innocent accumulation of material just made me more aware of how special you were. Do you know that some evenings when I'm approaching the house, tired from work, I get angry because you were such an affable human being? I think that if you had been a difficult person to live with, I could cope a lot better with returning to the empty house. Is this crazy thinking or isn't
this crazy thinking? Maybe I do need therapy. Maybe I am going over the edge.

People think they can make me feel better by telling me about others who have had harder blows than mine. They don't seem to understand that at this time I have no capacity for dealing in degrees of pain, and because I am expending all of my emotions on myself, I have none left over for the hardships of my neighbour.

My soul is dead and my heart is overflowing with emptiness.

I can't seem to cope with the neverness of death. Will I never again feel your arms around me? Never? Will I never again hear your laugh? Never? Will I never again watch you getting dressed and pulling your partly buttoned shirt over your head because it's quicker to get it on that way?

Sometimes I catch myself playing “let's pretend.” I look at the picture of us that is hanging in the dining room – the whole smiling family – and I make believe the children are small again, and at any moment you will come striding in from work and scoop us up in your arms. I save this game for especially terrible times because it is scary how tempting it is to permanently slip into a place where the ugliness of reality doesn't exist.

Today I was walking downtown, and I saw someone I knew walking along on the opposite side of the street. He waved a cheery hello, and I returned his wave, equally cheerily, even though I had just mopped away the tears that, seconds earlier, had streamed down my face, unbidden and unannounced. Afterwards, I wondered about the number of people who go about their day waving cheerily while their hearts are weighted with sorrow. Thoreau was probably right when he said most of us lead lives of quiet desperation.

Later on during that walk, I came face to face with someone who made it impossible for me even to force a cheerful exterior. She wanted to know the gory details. Did you die on the ice, in the dressing room or in the ambulance? Were you in the shower? Were you still dressed in your hockey equipment? I wanted to be mischievous and say you almost never took a shower in your hockey equipment because water plays havoc with shin guards, but I couldn't manage that much levity, especially when she added consolingly, “But Jean, you have so much going for you. You'll be remarried in no time at all.” She predicted on the outskirts of a year. I said when my cat got run over by a car I waited longer than that to get another one. She nodded without the slightest understanding. “That's the trouble with cats,” she said. “They get themselves killed.”

I've slowed down almost to a stop. I used to be such a mover and shaker that I practically met myself on the way to going somewhere else. Now it takes me a full hour to get dressed, a feat I could once accomplish in twenty minutes, fifteen if pressed. Some mornings are worse than others, and I've often used up two hours with nothing to show for the wasted time except washed teeth and combed hair and the books and papers I have to take back to the office humped into a pile by the front door. I'm told this slowness is a sign of depression. If that's the case, I must really be in the depths.

Thank God for good friends. They let me lean into them when I can no longer stand upright. We had three categories of friends: yours, mine and ours. In the beginning, all three were on hand. Now the group has withered down to a few of ours and a lot of mine. Mine are mostly women. Over the years they have enriched my life, and now they are sustaining it.

They have the sensitivity not to tell me that I must get on with my life. They know that, for now at least, I have no life, nor do I want one. Acquaintances are not so sensitive. “Life goes on,” they say, as if I am malingering and it is now time I was up and about. Perhaps they say it because they think it is something I want to hear or to
confirm that, for them at least, life does go on. Or perhaps it is as Shakespeare said, everyone can master a grief but he who has it.

Is there sleep after the death of a spouse? I walk myself into exhaustion every evening and yet sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care eludes me. Maybe Macbeth was right – only the innocent sleep. I am tortured with guilt over my sins of commission and omission. I won't allow myself to recall the happy times. Instead I dwell on the things I said which I shouldn't have said, or on the things I should have said and didn't. I can't think of any shortcomings of yours. When I telephoned our friend Al in Arizona and mentioned this to him, he said he can't wait to die so M. will canonize him. Is that what I'm doing to you?

What gives me the worst case of the guilts – positively the worst case – is that I can't recall you. I mean I can't recall the details of you. I try to picture you mowing the lawn, shovelling the walk, sitting at your desk grading exams, hunkered in your chair watching sports on television, and on and on, but no pictures come to mind. All that remains is the knowledge that you did do these things.

But now ask me to describe you in that casket and I
will supply you with the most minute detail. I can even see the rust stain on your little finger, just underneath your engineer's iron ring. I try to change the channel, but the same picture returns over and over again. It is as though the horror of you lying inert on that cold pleated satin has choked the life out of all other memories.

I've discovered there's nothing romantic about a sunrise if you have spent the dark hours roaming through empty rooms hoping daybreak will come before its time. Are insomnia and widowhood synonymous?

The days trudge towards Christmas. Yesterday I suggested to the children that we go to a restaurant for dinner on Christmas Day. They wouldn't have been more shocked if I had suggested we peddle pornography on a street corner. Only those to be pitied, they said, eat in restaurants on Christmas Day.

It isn't easy for them, either. They remember other Christmases – the stairs garlanded in red and green, the fireplace burning brightly and friends and relatives seated at a laden table.

I'm certain the three of us would prefer to wake up one morning and discover we had slept through the twentyfifth. I have learned a truth that my friend A. knew all along: special holidays make happy people happier and sad people sadder, and the more special the holiday, the more terrible it is for those who have no reason to celebrate it.

Haven't entered any thoughts for days. But then I haven't done much of anything for days. Heartache is consuming me.

This is the first Christmas Eve since we met that we will not be in church together. Isn't that an amazing record of togetherness? Steve came home last night for three days. We are going to early service. Although we haven't discussed it, neither of us is up to Midnight Mass. I hope the sermon doesn't dwell on the family aspect of Christmas.

Morning has broken. It's finally here. Dreading its arrival didn't hold it back for an instant. Steve and I are sleeping late – or, more precisely, we are clinging late to the bed. Neither of us has even turned on our radio, knowing the Christmas music will pierce deep into our flesh.

Hallelujah the night! We went to the hotel for dinner. The four of us – Sue, Ben, Steve and I – were so very polite to each other. Ben was on his best behaviour and acted more like thirty-nine than nine. On the way home we confessed our relief that the dining room had been crowded and we hadn't felt like waifs in a storm. We came back to the house and gave Ben the gifts you had bought for him early in November. After he opened them, he said shyly that he dreamed about you last night. He saw you smiling down at him from Heaven. Were you?

Already I'm dreading next Christmas. Does time really heal? I wish I could believe it does.

Tonight I'm remembering other Christmases. I remember when you were an engineering student and Susan was just an infant. We had an attic apartment, and the roof was so slanted the only place you could stand up straight was in the centre of the living room. On Christmas Eve, after we put Susan to bed, we went out to the back veranda and reeled in the day's diapers. We had to crack them off the line. We brought them in and stood them over the heating ducts in the kitchen to thaw, and after a few minutes they leaned against the wall like tired old men. That night the sky was so blue it made the snow look blue, too. I have no idea why this memory has stayed with me all these years, but to this day, whenever I smell clean cotton drying, I recall that Christmas Eve.

Another special Christmas was the first one we spent in Arizona, when you were working on your doctorate. Alan was visiting us, and on Christmas Eve he played a record of Mel Torme singing “The Christmas Song.” I got so lonely for home, especially when he sang that part about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, that I began to cry and Alan chided me, saying we never even had a fireplace at home, much less roasted chestnuts over one, so why the nostalgia? A little later we took the children for a drive in the desert, and we brought back a scraggly mesquite bush and decorated it with cookies because we were too poor to buy proper decorations. In the morning, Alan scoured our housing area for other displaced persons like ourselves. He found eight, and we had a delightful blueberry pancake breakfast.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about death. I need to believe in the existence of a hereafter. I mean I always believed, but now it is essential that I believe. I want to be able to rejoin you and Alan and the significant others who have left me behind. John Keats said, “life is but a day; a fragile dewdrop on its perilous way.” For my part, I want life to be only an anteroom in that mansion of many rooms.

Actually, I'm now so preoccupied with death that I'm getting to be as bad as my mother, who, after my father's too-early death, wanted only to read the obituary notices in the newspaper. “Give me the section with the deaths,” she would say in her heavy Irish brogue. Now I, too, am searching that column for signs of others dying before
their time. I think it gives me comfort when I find I'm not the only one who has had someone suddenly snatched away. Macabre, yes!

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and I've decided to run away. Steve has gone back to work, and the house is like a tomb. Our friends F. & C. are insisting that I join them for our regular New Year's party. How can I sing “Auld Lang Syne” without your arm around my waist? Besides, my presence would probably put a pall on the party. I've decided to visit my friend B. in Ottawa. Going away without you will be a traumatic first, but surely it won't be as bad as staying here without you.

It is 12:30, so it is really New Year's Day. B. and I went to a movie –
Out of Africa
.

A song in the movie was one that was played at our wedding reception, “Let the Rest of the World Go By.” I almost came unglued but kept my composure by devouring the economy-sized container of buttered popcorn B. bought in the lobby. She said it was to be our moment of decadence and the devil with spreading hips. We went
to bed as soon as we returned to her apartment, neither of us wanting to wait for the New Year countdown on television or witness the rounds of merry kissing. We didn't even wish each other Happy New Year. I guess we sensed they would be empty words for both of us.

I'm still in Ottawa. Went shopping today to pass the time while B. was at work. The first window display I came upon had a mannequin dressed in an overcoat identical to the one I gave you for your birthday last February. I said it made you look European, and you wanted to know what was wrong with looking Canadian. When I saw that coat in the window, I, a hardcore shopper, caved in. I lost all interest in the stores. Will my world always be as flat and as joyless as it is now?

Home again, home again . . . I haven't words to describe the loneliness of arriving at the airport last night without anyone to meet me and then having to come back to this house alone. I took a taxi from the airport, and anger at you got me inside the house. I was angry at you for dying and leaving me in such a mess.

My fury pumped up such adrenalin that I got the courage to search the basement for intruders, all the while praying to God I wouldn't find any. I blamed you for taking the joy out of returning to my well-ordered home. I always delighted in returning to this house after a hiatus. I especially loved my many-windowed kitchen. I could sit for hours and watch the sun filter in through the melon-coloured curtains and then slant across the green and white couches. Even in the midst of winter, there was a feeling of a hazy summer day.

My friend A. came to visit me tonight. She chastized me for not letting her know when I was returning because she wanted to meet me at the airport. In a mellow mood after a couple of glasses of Bailey's Irish Cream, I confided to her that I am considering becoming a missionary. I explained that I now have this overpowering need to immerse myself in a great cause. “A missionary?” she hooted, waving her empty glass in my direction. “
You
? A missionary?” She leaned close to me as though she were going to impart a great secret and said in a very earnest voice, “Jean, you are the god-damnedest most selfindulgent woman I have ever known,” and without further preamble she launched into the reasons why I am singularly unsuited to tracking down pagans in the bowels
of Africa. She demanded to know how I am going to survive in the jungles and deserts without my foaming baths, my satin lingerie and my designer perfume. Then she, a confirmed atheist, asked how I could be so arrogant as to presume the Lord would choose me to do great deeds in far away places?